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Biography

Born 1939 in Trier, Germany. 5 Semesters architecture in Darmstadt, studies of art in the class of Johannes Geccelli at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (art academy), Berlin. Exam 1969/70
Participation in the Große Kunstausstellung Düsseldorf (great art exhibition) 1977 - '83 + 1985 and '87 with pictures in pigments and glue. Portraits and drawings of objekts till end of 2001. Since 2002 virtual pics. Lives in Düsseldorf.

Impressions of Different Authors
Translation by Klaus SCHNEIDERS

Excerpts from Hans WARNECKE’s address at the former
Synagogue in Ahrweiler, 12 January 2003

Everyday life contemplates us, questions, provokes, tempts us with incomplete words in certain directions, presents abstracts of reality. It questions and drops hints. It disguises itself and refuses to reveal itself at first glance. AndreasLudwig has succeeded in portraying this everyday life by using different techniques. He remembers mixing powder pigments with wallpaper paste when he was a student in Berlin because it allowed him to achieve particularly translucent coats of paint. But in the same way that he has developed as an artist, he has moved on from the techniques he used at that time. These days, for example, he has a special liking for black tea and red wine, while he is painting mind you, because both produce excellent effects.

When Andreas Ludwig enters into a dialogue with us as observer, he does not do so with a strong moralizing undertone in order to prompt us to approach his paintings with a fitting reverence. In this exhibition we encounter everyday life and part of this is hinted at in the composition while another part is worked through with an astonishing precision, reminding us that photorealism was not an unknown dimension to Andreas Ludwig either in the 1970s. It is obvious to anyone viewing the exhibited paintings here that Andreas Ludwig can master any problem in terms of drawing ability but at the same time he often imposes a restriction on himself in terms of colouring. This gives his paintings a playful element which is by no means accidental but intentional.
12.01.2003 Hans WARNECKE





[In different daily newspapers about earlier exhibitions e.g. texts published by Professor Emeritus Dr. Andreas FRANZKE, who taught History of Art in Karlsruhe. He has excelled as an author e.g. of monographies on Antoni Tápies, Georg Baselitz, Jean Dubuffet and Stephan Balkenhol.]

The copies (of a larger number of more recent aquarelles) give a very good idea not only of the subjects but also the technical design process on which they are based. Ludwig has developed a perception of the world which investigates, highlights, exposes passages of a glimpse of simple objects so that you think you can find your way into and behind what is presented. The mere way in which his eye draws you, singles out here, remains on the surface there, feels the ‘skin’ elsewhere, this has a very graphic effect.
He understands how to bring a realistic suggestion and abstraction into dialogue in a variety of ways.
(Re the aquarelles:) What seems really exciting is that each sheet appears to be in a different state of completion, and the parts that are merely hinted at in a great number of cases support the representation just as much as the parts he has worked through ... . Seeing and experiencing through seeing, empathising with proportionality through simple comprehension, all this is found and more in the large sheets where there are hardly any blank spaces because it becomes clear where some areas are consciously left unpainted.
Andreas FRANZKE




Kreisstadt-Echo, 15.01.03, exhibition in the former synagogue Ahrweiler.
Hildegard GINZLER

Everyday Life Rediscovered

Andreas Ludwig generates inspiring irritation with his paintings
The new exhibition in Ahrweiler’s former synagogue bears the title “Everyday Life. Still Life and Interior Paintings on Paper from the Last 22 Years.” Düsseldorf painter Andreas Ludwig exhibits aquarelles and paintings created with wallpaper glue. Wallpaper glue is blended with pigments, a technique producing very thin glazes and therefore a very controlled creation of colour.
Everyday life then. Where so many introductory speeches time and again publicise the well-known Picasso quotation “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”. And now someone comes along and wants to offer up an artistic encounter with everyday life? The motives imply this. Andreas Ludwig, born 1939, who was an art master at grammar schools from 1970 to 2002, introduces us to everyday places and things. In the workroom, at the writing desk, meal table, on the building site or in the street. The way he does it is anything but an everyday occurrence. Let us consider one example. Interior with two slide projectors on a metal stand. Your eye is fully engaged in sorting out the wealth of visual elements. A black curtain and the projectors are persistent surfaces set against the lines of the cross bar and vertical frame. A gloomy scenario - just a few bluish passages lift up the severe black and white impression - the observer feels rather like an intruder in a silent, secretive world. Recognising things becomes an adventure, seeing a perception which appears to pose more exciting questions than answer them.
“Violin on a Log” is one such work. The instrument is lying on an open green velvet box on a log. Underneath we can make out a saw and a turquoise circular power saw. Beauty and horror are brought together in close proximity. Analogies arise as well but which ones? Just as the versatile tones of the violin reach our ears so too the screeching sounds of the saw. The one caresses our soul, the other racks our nerves. Similar to the still life of the old masters, the objects appear as vehicles for symbols. Violin and log can embody wonderful art and craftsmanship, leisure and work, dreams and danger. A pale mask lying on the floor touches on the vanitas genre, in other words it reminds us of the brevity of life and inevitability of death. It therefore cancels out the above contradictions. In the face of death, the great qualifier of all that is earthly, violin and log appear alongside each other ultimately (albeit differently) as expressions of life.
You are invited to find interpretations without having to commit yourself to one in particular. The painting quite obviously issues this invitation, however, impresses by its pictorial attractions.
Andreas Ludwig succeeds in bringing out both graphic and scenic features. This is obvious in many of his works. Precise details appear alongside blurred formulation. This holds your attention. He engenders irritation through the unfamiliar combination of motifs (violin/saw, mop/cheese or violin/peeled lemon) and idiosyncratic segments. In some works, the observer experiences that he has unconsciously absorbed the conventions of defined painting. When the painter presents a bouquet of white roses in surroundings bathed in blue, the observer sees the delightful blossoms against green shadows in a long tradition of paintings which paid homage to the beauty of such flowers ... until his gaze gradually moves away from the bouquet and he becomes aware of the table on which the flowers are standing, the bleed figures resting there and at the edges of the painting a bottle of mineral water and the typical shape of a black/brown Maggi seasoning bottle which pulls him from the flowery atmosphere down to mundane earth. But not for long, he is then captivated once again by the magic of the light blue colourfulness which is the prelude to him engaging with the painting again, perhaps this time in an entirely different way.
Curiously mellow tones, reminiscent of still life painter Giorgio Morandi, predominate in “Remov”. The title alludes to the only partially recognisable writing on a cardboard box. Its full title is “Removal”. Apart from the box, there is a hi-fi system with loudspeakers and several undefinable things. The spatial relationships also remain unclear. The tired warm colours cover everything like a thin layer of dust. Melancholy is apparent everywhere. Because it is inherent in the farewell that preceded the move? Because the things lying about have been written off, have become useless in the new contexts, forgotten and a functionless, empty existence for them is dawning? The painter shows us everyday life, points out the unknown in the known, ranging from the interesting pattern of the trainers through to initially concealed levels of meaning. Take a fresh look at his diversely appealing paintings, which are on show every day from 2.00 to 5.00 pm until 19 January, and allow the optics to make it into a personal experience. - HG -(Hildegard GINZLER)

February 2007
Andreas Ludwig = Udo Ludo on:
From Visual to Virtual, Painting with Brushes, Pencil and Mouse Click

Peter KÖRFGEN

Andreas Ludwig is one of those painters whose self-concept is defined by a principle which the French philosopher Victor Cousin called l’art pour l’art: art for art’s sake. He made a clear statement almost 200 years ago: no more aims and objectives predetermined externally. This was at the same time a challenge: for art to develop its own laws, you have to allow it the necessary space.
Applying this slogan, Victor Cousin reduced what Immanuel Kant had previously demanded down to a popular denominator. For him, art was supposed to be identical to uninterested pleasure, understood as a plea for the unintentional, far from sophisticated calculation, and beyond speculation.
The forty works chosen by Andreas Ludwig for this exhibition have to fulfil a high degree of self-expectation. The title hints at their range: From Visual to Virtual, Painting with Brush, Pencil and Mouse Click - a title that essentially reflects the diverse painting methods and their materials.
It all started when Andreas Ludwig developed a preference for working with coloured paste during his studies, a process where powder pigments are mixed with wallpaper paste. As this technique allows the artist great scope for glazing, in other words working in translucent layers, Andreas Ludwig preferred it to painting with oil and acrylic paints.
He soon added the techniques of painting in watercolours and drawing - both areas that meanwhile dominate within the overall spectrum.
At the end of 2002, a time he can almost pinpoint exactly on the calendar, he slid into the so-called virtual world of digital image editing - not abruptly but rather by chance, tentatively but nevertheless profoundly. He notes that he is still fascinated by the potential of realising old ideal concepts in dealing with the visual by a click of the mouse. This finally merges into an attempt to revive the correlation - literally - between image and text. This means he is trying to correlate and interlink the painted subject and the written word, to produce joint creativity.
So much for the formal, datable aspect, moving on to the spectrum of motifs, at least in sections. What we get to see in terms of street scenes, rows of houses, backyards - none of it is picturesque in a conventional sense. Anything that could be in any way flattering, spruced up, or chosen is carefully avoided. Old cracked house walls emerge, rotting cable boxes, bizarre spray figures, the moonscapes of downtrodden linoleum floors. Signatures of life not ugliness. We also encounter things from the junk and rubbish heap, stored,
put aside, forgotten - in the corner of a cellar, in a cupboard, cubbyhole. Including tools, pliers, drill, screwdriver, precisely prepared, quite passionate. Individual numbers, he was especially taken with the number 2, sometimes lettering, on packaging, small calligraphic journeys, reminiscent of his first course of study, namely architecture. It even seems to reverberate on a multiple level, not only here and there, but in the entire oeuvre, and even if only in the form of a structuring pattern.
Finally, still life, obviously more or less spontaneous ideas. The workplace with paint-box, brushes, calendar sheets, writing pads; a view of the kitchen table: cooking spoon, grater, sugar bowl. And finally jars of bottled fruit arranged on a sideboard, and in between a bulbous jug at the front, evoking the pattern of table cloths.
A crossover of styles and stages, a quite ascetic abstinence in terms of colour stands out, an almost phobic restraint over any stronger nuance through to the complete abandonment of colour - with the effect that the pencil sketchings are seen to emerge in some places between the coloured parts of the painting like a pallid carcass, as if the work was abruptly suspended, only to be completed at some later date.
This impression of incompleteness is reinforced by the feeling that the composition of the image appears to force its way out of the available format as if the painter was not in control. But whether apparently ill-proportioned or unfinished, nothing is at any rate unintentional. On the contrary. Each of these configurations draws the observer into his own concept of completion, allows him in a way to think it through to the end. Besides everyone thinks they know how things around them look. It is enough to just hint at them.
This means that Andreas Ludwig does not even try to make an attempt at reinventing painting. And this is why it is often enough for him to set markers in a playful way. Incidentally, this is reflected in the chosen name he uses to sign some of the exhibited works: Udo Ludo, derived from the Latin verb ludere to play.
We encounter this playful element also in those works where Andreas Ludwig alias Udo Ludo tries to create a connection between the painted subject and the written word. At the same time, this very clearly reflects the intention to include the observer in a quasi creative role.
An example of this is the picture of a lion statue, brought up so close that you can virtually stroke it, weather-beaten, scarred from thousands of years with its maned head, and empty eye sockets that appear brutally alive. And within this archaic stone a text by Meir Shalev about the slowness of sound waves in the desert. And about stories recounted in Israel that the sounds of the harps once taken into captivity near Babylon still reverberate today around the scorchingly hot gorges of the Negev.
This means: it is up to the observer to regard the lion as a contemporary stone witness of Nebucadnezar, to interpret its marble texture as a parable for persistence or conversely in view of its injuries to regard it as a symbol of transition. If the observer so wishes, he can come to a completely different conclusion.
Finally, we return to the beginning, to Kant’s postulate that art should be identical to the unintentional and unspeculative which would be complemented by the undogmatic and unideological, claims to which any and everyone will agree in this abstract form. Particularly if we bear in mind our national delusion that art can even be judged by biological criteria. Tempi passati. Thank goodness. Meanwhile we are however exposed to challenges in terms of civilisation of a quite different nature.
The most obvious: we are no longer, as hitherto in an unprecedented way, merely bombarded with information but virtually torpedoed with information of an entirely uncontrollable origin where we can hardly separate the wheat from the chaff, nevertheless combined with a moral claim to truth and the appeal for us to believe what they teach us to see, hear and read.
The clearly discernible defensive reaction consists above all in condensing this flood to the significative content beneficial to each individual.
“What's the message?” is the slogan.

Why this excursion? Because you cannot exclude that this slogan catches on in the middle of an exhibition like this: What's the message? That you suddenly want to know what you want from someone because everyone wants something.

It is therefore perhaps a good idea to prepare yourself in advance:
Nothing is required of you. The exhibition announces nothing, predicts nothing, promises nothing. Instead it reveals only glimpses, only communicates them: that’s how things are. But perhaps ultimately they do convey a message: the message of things.
03.03.2007 Peter KÖRFGEN


Translated by Klaus SCHNEIDERS